Well, #teamCHYP were out in force in Barcelona. Not for the Formula One testing but for the annual mobile industry shindig, the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress. As usual, we had full days of meetings interspersed with traversing the halls in search of anything that might be of interest to clients. I don’t want to talk about the innovations in mobile (like cool bendy screens and the Samsung S10 under glass fingerprint sensor) here, but I do want to make a point about the renewed focus on digital identity.

We made digital identity one of our “live five” areas for clients to focus on this year, so I was very happy indeed to to be asked to take part in a fireside chat on the subject of trust and identity with Ajay Bhalla, President, Cyber and Intelligence Solutions at Mastercard. He’s a smart guy, and well-positioned to survey the landscape to help us to pick out some routes between the hackers and fraudsters and hucksters and scaremongers.

We didn’t
rehearse any questions, we just went on stage to have an intelligent
conversation about what can be done to gain, and maintain, the trust of the
public. If we cannot do this, then online commerce, online government and
online interaction of all kinds will be subverted and the friction associated
with online transactions will become so great that the economy will suffer.
Ajay was optimistic about the new technologies in this space (as are the team
at Consult Hyperion) and explained how biometrics and big data will work
together to identify customers and minimise disruption to customer journeys.

(I think Mastercard and the other schemes will want to set the bar quite high here. When PSD2 comes in to effect in September, poor implementations of Secure Customer Authentication, or SCA, will have significant financial impacts on online businesses)

It was
certainly educational to discuss these issues with Ajay. The fact is that
Mastercard is making significant investments in the digital identity space
means that their opinions, and their strategy, are of great interest. As it
happened, Mastercard’s executive Vice Chair Ann Cairns was also emphasising
their focus on digital identity at the event.

You can see
why digital ID is so crucial. Identity theft and fraud have become significant
friction in the online world and so tackling them is a priority. But there’s
also the strategic role of identity in the always-on, connected world. I can
well imagine an ecosystem in which Mastercard switch vastly more identity
transactions – everything from letting my garage door identity my car on the
way to logging me to the Daily Telegraph – than payment transactions.

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